LWN's unreliable 2014 predictions
LWN's unreliable 2014 predictions
Posted Jan 2, 2014 13:02 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)In reply to: LWN's unreliable 2014 predictions by jcm
Parent article: LWN's unreliable 2014 predictions
I think that more than 1% of the mobile market cares about FOSS and privacy... and aren't happy enough with iOS and Android... so they are looking for an alternative. Are any of the platforms mentioned as up-and-comers better? I don't know.
I attended a presentation on how easy it is to make and deploy (to the Google Play store even) an application that does all kinds of things the user doesn't want without informing the user... and that's putting it kindly. It leads me to believe that Android has become a platform (and the presenter said that iOS isn't really any better) that aids the bad guys more than ever before... built on top of Linux. It's rather sad. I don't necessarily blame Google for the behavior of some of their application developers and I'm not sure what they could do to improve the situation.
It leads one to wonder if closed/proprietary software, especially of the freeware kind on proprietary operating systems, has always been chock full of bad stuff. I'm guessing not and that it is just the masses using mobile and the information/data that they create/make available that has become such an irresistible target.
Posted Jan 2, 2014 23:31 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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Why do you think that? On desktop Linux has about 1% and not all these people “care about FOSS and privacy” (think steamOS: it's designed to deliver proprietary programs with DRM and still is accepted adequately well by a lot of “Linux guys”). And mobile users are less technically savvy than desktop users! Of course. Was there any doubt? In a world where 99% of users are ready to seel their soul for the dancing pigs any platform which will try to oppose such trend too much will lose. Because in the end of the day an OS (any OS) is only a vehicle for an apps and if users want apps with dancing pings and not apps they could control… what could you do? You can ban worst offenders, but if you'll start a jihad against such abuse then you'll lose developers and then you'll lose users, too. If you think that they you probably have very little experience with freeware trends. Even when you install freeware from established software houses you usually get quite a surprise as free addon. For example Java will happily go and install Ask toolbar which will hijack your homepage if you forget to disable it. And you need to disable it every time new version of Java with security fixes comes out!
LWN's unreliable 2014 predictions
I think that more than 1% of the mobile market cares about FOSS and privacy...
It leads one to wonder if closed/proprietary software, especially of the freeware kind on proprietary operating systems, has always been chock full of bad stuff.
I'm guessing not and that it is just the masses using mobile and the information/data that they create/make available that has become such an irresistible target.